This disclosure relates generally to the field of management of information technology (IT) services. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, it relates to a technique for improving usability of IT service models.
Business Service Management (BSM) is a methodology of viewing technology infrastructure administration and problem diagnosis from the perspective of its impact on critical business services rather than technology silos. One aspect of BSM is Service Impact Management (SIM), which is the ability to determine, visualize, report, and diagnose the impact of problems reported in technology infrastructure based on the impact these problems impose on business services that utilize the affected pieces of technology infrastructure. SIM implementations often involve service models that model the IT services of the enterprise.
Service models in today's IT environment are typically complex, containing potentially thousands of underlying dependent services. The representation of these services in operation views is typically done using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where each service is represented as a node in the graph. From an operational concept, today's event handling methodologies allow customers to limit the amount of false alarms for service impacting events. When there are only a few events in those big service models, however, the visualization aspect may become challenging for the user. On one hand, complex user interface (UI) components can be used to provide as much data as possible about the event so all information is available to the user without requiring too much screen switching. On the other hand, the complexity of the service models makes it difficult to present the most important data given the limited screen display area that is available.
Furthermore, with complex service models, expanding the service graph to display the problem node(s) or collapsing the service graph to remove nodes of no interest is typically done with multiple mouse clicks, expanding one level at a time.